Can somebody explain Frozen Orb?

[Clervis]

I'm trying to calculate the Frozen Orb damage and effect, but this has to be one of the hardest skills to quantify in terms of damage.

By the look of it, the initial Orb comes out and spews about 20 Ice Bolts(?) before it explodes into a ring of about 15. It seems that the orb itself also takes damage as it passes through an enemy or is that just the little bolts coming out of it?

Now, ignoring resists or resistance reduction, a orb dealing 500 damage then has the potential to deal up to 17,500 damage per orb. Of course, there are people who've reach 1,000 damage orb with enough -enemy resists to have it bottom out at -100. In that case an orb can do 70,000 damage total!
Is this right so far? Or does the actual orb do damage too?

Now my question is, how does the cold damage affect enemies? Why is it that blizzard can freeze some guys to a stand still and orb doesn't seem to be able to?

[MasterBeef]

My understanding of Frozen Orb is that the damage shown in the stat screen is the damage of each single bolt, and that it spews out 20 bolts in sequence, followed by 20 bolts at once when it 'explodes'.

I'm unwilling to scrutinize it any further myself, I suck at maths.

[rainsnow]

A Frozen Orb is a pack of 40 Icebolts. Beening cast the Orb flys 10 yards, then blows up. While flying, the Orb shoots 20 Icebolts. When blown up, the Orb shoots 20 more Icebolts that fly 10 yards. When the Orb passes through a creature, the creature takes damage of 5 Icebolts. When the Orb blows up inside a creature, the creature takes damage of 20 Icebolts.

[RTB]

A Frozen Orb is a pack of 40 Icebolts. Beening cast the Orb flys 10 yards, then blows up. While flying, the Orb shoots 20 Icebolts. When blown up, the Orb shoots 20 more Icebolts that fly 10 yards. When the Orb passes through a creature, the creature takes damage of 5 Icebolts. When the Orb blows up inside a creature, the creature takes damage of 20 Icebolts.
The orb lasts for 30 frames and shoots one missile per frame, the explosion at the end launches 16 missiles, and there's no fixed amount of dmg a target will get if the orb goes straight through it.

[Pezmaster]

so is that 29 shards from frames + 16 from the explosion on last frame? (=45 total)
or is it 30 from frames + 16 from one more frame? (=46 total)

45 makes more sense to me, but for clarification purposes....

[Clervis]

Anyway to calculate the orb damage itself then? How about the freezing effects?

[Arek]

A big help is to know monsters hitpoints and resistances (foundable on arreat summit page). Then you can nicely imagine how much damage is your orb doing and from wich angle. Frozen orb is having a hard time against monsters with lots of hitpoints. There you have to micro the explosion damage, what isn't too comfortable, fencing it to a secondary or a boss killer skill.

Neither frozen orb, nor blizzard are freezing. It might look that blizzard is freezing because of it's huge damage wich puts monsters in the hit recovery. So they look like frozen:smiley:

(Sorry for my horrible english :badteeth: )

[Clervis]

Does anybody know if casting delay apply to Chance to Cast items? Like Frozen Orb on rift, could you shoot out two consecutive Orbs within the casting delay?

[Marthax]

Yes it does. If the chance occurs and in your example, a FO is fired, your FO button will turn red because of the delay.